Posted
by
timothyon Wednesday July 08, 2009 @08:14AM
from the bring-on-the-shiny dept.

Zaiff Urgulbunger writes "After yearsofspeculation, Google has announced Google Chrome OS, which should be available mid-2010. Initially targeting netbooks, its main selling points are speed, simplicity and security — which kind of implies that the current No.1 OS doesn't deliver in these areas! The Chrome OS will run on both x86 and ARM architectures, uses a Linux kernel with a new windowing system. According to Google, 'For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.' Google says that this new OS is separate from Android, as the latter was designed for mobile phones and set-top boxes, whereas Chrome OS is designed 'for people who spend most of their time on the web.'"The New York Times' coverage is worth reading, and there are stories popping up all over the web.

Great. I'm sure current applications will be compatible, nothing will break, all the libs will support the compiles, and so on.

This is not to put down any effort to get rid of X11, rather, my guess that cross-operating system application porting will once again go to hell, cause conditional compiles, and much Zantac consumption.

Great. I'm sure current applications will be compatible, nothing will break, all the libs will support the compiles, and so on.

Why would any of that concern Google?

They'll be offering a cut-down OS, probably with a new windowing system based on Android, which offers opportunities to develop web apps in the future which truly span the gap between connected desktop apps and web apps. They won't be concerned with porting existing Linux apps over, and neither will their users, who will be buying a netbook to use google mail, some sort of IM app and the internet, and not much more.

It's not even clear if you'll be able to write binary apps for the system at all (they mention web apps and nothing else). Supporting Linux apis would just slow them down, and it probably won't be X based anyway.

This is a foundation for a new generation of apps which aren't beholden to binary APIs controlled by the likes of Microsoft. In parallel with Chrome it lets them dictate the future of web/desktop integration, and start really pushing HTML5 features, and online/offline integration, rather than being continually held back by Microsoft's attempts to hobble the web and tie it to Windows.

This is not to put down any effort to get rid of X11, rather, my guess that cross-operating system application porting will once again go to hell, cause conditional compiles, and much Zantac consumption.

All of which matters... not at all. The whole purpose of the device is to run ONE application, the browser. Everything else is there to support that.

I suppose they'll have to design some other applications, to manage machine-specific configuration (WiFi settings, etc.) but maybe they'll just do that through a localhost web interface as well.

Google doesn't care if it's impossible to build standard applications on it; actually from their perspective it's probably a plus if you can't. (And I expect they'll probably lock it down to make it intentionally hard to do.) Easier to support.

Based on what's been made available so far, the device is squarely targeted at people who do all their work in the browser, or could start doing it. It's essentially a thin client to Google's web apps.

Tell me, what kind of backwards logic makes the X server be the display and the X client be the application?

Logic that accounts for two facts; that computers can have multiple users, and that they can be networked. SSH lets you run arbitrary command-line applications on remote machines. To do that with arbitrary graphical applications - emphasis on "arbitrary", i.e. not re-writing every graphical app as a GUI client & back-end server - you need something on the local machine to which the remote machine can send display commands, and for proper integration with graphical apps running on the local machine, ideally that same something should be catering for both. So.. you run a display server, and anything that wants to display graphics - locally or otherwise - connects to it. Simple.

Like a lot of things in the *NIX world, it stops seeming backwards when you discard a few assumptions: that a computer is only used by one person (or that everyone who uses it is happy to share the same account), and that a keyboard, monitor and mouse will always be plugged in. These assumptions have kept Windows out of many a server room for years.

However, the difficulties of writing user-friendly software outside the "comfort zone" these assumptions provide have kept Linux out of many a living room for just as long. It's not impossible, though, and the situation is improving rapidly.

They could have just invested in Canonical and Ubuntu, rather than try to reinvent the wheel.

Why Canonical and not any other Linux company, I mean (K/X/Ed)Ubuntu is great, (most of my computers run Kubuntu or Xubuntu), but Google has a particular objective: directing as many as possible users to Google products, this is clearly not the goal of Canonical.

And besides, diversity is good, the goal is not to supersede one monoculture with another - Ok, Google is not the first address as far as diversity is concerned, but still.

Another window manager just dilutes the current pool of people trying to do KDE and Gnome.

It's not that the two are the only players in the FLOSS field, and probably they are not even the best for the specific requirements of netbooks. Fluxbox, Enlightment [enlightenment.org], or even something like Sugar [sugarlabs.org] are much more lightweight and might be better for the functions required. Or even Google has something new and exciting to offer. Anyways, I even doubt that the KDE and Gnome guys actually wouldn't appreciate other ideas being tested.

Well, the UI is the most resource intensive aspect Linux from my perspective. Conversely, the java VMs on android are probably it's greatest resource hog. Windows and MAC have more "optimized" UIs, whereas most things on Linux UI are X-based which means most communication is serialized through a single socket and much information is stored redundantly in the app and the X-server. Hell, in recent versions of Fedora I have a problem where my X-server grows to over a gig of RAM even when all windows have been closed. I hate the fact that I have to log-out/in-again because of mem-leaks in either X or gnome (can't determine which). Ironically, I still prefer gnome over Mac/Windows UIs in terms of it's expressiveness / adaptability to my needs.

So it makes sense to provide OS hooks for an alternate UI mode.. Hell there's dedicated VGA mode for games in existing Linux. Gnome/KDE are not light-weight (though X can be), and I can't imagine how you could retool them to be. Much less how you could to this in a way that supports existing KDE/Gnome/X apps.

Remember, we're talking the slowest possible hardware above cell-phone-grade that we're talking about here. Big screen and keyboard, but essentially a cell-phone/PDA on the backend. I wouldn't be surprised if the browser is required to be full screen like on a cell.

Further, there is a serious argument to be made about low-performance devices and the lack of desire to store sensitive / loosable information on them. Viruses + hardware failure + hardware upgrade means losing your data. While some people avidly setup backup strategies, it's applied with lesser diligence to lower-end devices. And if you're buying on the cheap, than backup solutions cost extra thereby defeating the point. Why buy a $100 netbook then have to buy a $90 external backup hard drive?

I'm not saying this isn't valid, I'm saying that there are massive groups of people that are affected by quality-control issues and migration strategies of software vendors including MS, and google is allegedly attempting to obviate that aspect entirely by making low-cost devices 100% online.

I do see a valid use-case.. 3'rd world, poor US citizens, virtually every high school/elementary school.

Of course google is merely trying to promote it's online dominance and we should take pause. But other than the OS, I'm not sure that this ties your experience to google (though maybe their search engine/user-profile - but anti-trust will eventually kick in).

I have a problem where my X-server grows to over a gig of RAM even when all windows have been closed.

You do realize that X memmaps the video memory into its memory space? This gives it some rather crazy numbers for RAM usage even when it's running thin. Especially with modern cards having 512MB of video mem or more.

You say "single socket" as if all of the X clients were contending for a resource. Every connection accepted by a server (any server) creates a new file descriptor in that process. There's no more a problem with a "single socket" in X11 than there is in any other server.

Moreover, unless all of your applications are running over the network, they're almost certainly using shared memory rather than file IO (through the socket) for display. Your entire characterization of X11 shows how little you know about how it works.

This is just details, the fact of the matter is that Microsoft, Apple, and even Be had much faster methods of accessing video hardware and displaying things on the screen. Whether or not it's constrained to a single socket, it's constrained to a socket model and thus the filesystem IO interface. The network transparency would be wonderful if we still had our graphics hardware in separate boxes from our servers, but Google is making a desktop system. DRI/DRM are not really broad enough for modern graphics hardware, anyway. If Google is clever, they'll use their muscle to start from scratch, providing a sane opengl accelerated driver model, like Apple. X's architecture is probably at the peak performance-wise of what the open source community can make it do.

What, you mean framebuffer? Yes, it exists, but it's extremely slow. If there are games that use it, I still wouldn't characterize it as being "for games". OpenGL under X11 is definitely the preferred setup for accelerated video.

It's better, but it's not WDDM... this is just the best of what's currently available. Any graphical application from video playback to 3d will always perform better on Windows than Linux on the same hardware. It doesn't matter whether you're using OpenGL or Direct X, they just have a proper display model for the desktop. The last thing the linux community needs is people trying to pull X into another decade, making it now almost 30 years out of date.

Not all of us like KDE and Gnome. Although they have innovated in some areas, they're otherwise both just attempts to make an MS clone. While this might be the right thing to make "Linux on the desktop" succeed, it's not what some of envision as the future of computing or even how we'd like the current state of computing.

I've been a Linux user since 1996 and I've watched the entire "Linux on the desktop" debacle unfold. It's sad to see that the/. crowd has changed from the attitude of "these MS clones are crap, desktop Linux should be something better" to "ho hum, this is how it should be, why innovate"? Back when this was just "Rob's page" you would've been flamed into oblivion for that public show of affection for KDE/Gnome.

Who are you to tell Google what they can and cannot build? It's about time someone put a face on the Linux desktop other than that of an MS clone. Hopefully it's not just a new window manager but a new window system. X, while great in its day, has run its course. I'd like to something fresh that builds on the concept of using modern graphics hardware to do all the heavy lifting for the GUI instead of clever CPU-intensive hacks on top of Xlib**.

You don't like Google's vision for Linux on netbooks. What's your alternative vision?

** I've written many apps with Xlib. The underlying ideas/primitives that X uses for graphics ops are obsolete so doing anything "cool" (and sometimes useful!) requires using crufty extensions rather than calling routines that are a "natural" part of the system.

3) Try to get people to download it, install it alongside or replace their current OS (how many of us would really do this except to try it out as a toy and then go back to our other OS?

It has a lot more potential on the desktop than you suggest. Imagine dual booting between Windows and the Google Chrome OS. You could boot nearly instantly into the Google OS to browse the web in complete security. The Google OS could also run from a VM for secure web browsing as well. Windoz users becoming routinely p0wned will be a thing of the past.

Imagine the stereotypical average user actually having any comprehension of what you're talking about.
If the average user was that computer-savvy, Windows users wouldn't get routinely p0wned to begin with.

This is excellent news, because a commercial vendor with *lots* of clout will - finally! - push Linux to OEMs. Like Android, they really want to go after the OEM market with this one. Don't be fooled by the "it's mainly for web browsing" spin - You might not run AutoCAD or Photoshop yet (or ever) on it, but apps (especially HTML5 enabled apps) for home users will follow, targeting the XP/Vista Home Edition user types. And this would be sweet for corporate desktop deployments -- no virus hassles, little to update, most stuff stored on the server (assuming they get offline support sorted out well, of course).

Fingers crossed that Google's "Linux" will have more polish than what's there in distros so far. Microsoft "love our licensing or leave" and Linux distros "we're open source so live with the flaws" will then both be on notice.

I can't wait to see what the new windowing system is. I'd really like to see some innovation there, much like OSX created an amazing GUI layer on top what is essentially Mach/BSD. The challenge to Microsoft aside, this will be a wake-up call to Gnome/KDE. The good news is, because this ought to be open source, the OSS community can really get behind this and improve other products.

And oh, anyone else notice the irony that the Chrome _browser_ for Linux seems largely like an afterthought right now? Still, way to go, Google.

You and me both, but I'm a little confused. What do they mean by "windowing system"? Are they doing a rewrite of X11, or do they mean they are designing new window decorations and widgets (e.g. gtk or qt), or do they mean the whole desktop environment (e.g., kde, gnome)?

If it's a replacement for X11, why are they doing that? I could see that maybe X11 has too much legacy code and really isn't designed to be the most efficient for a single screen laptop where you don't need an X windows server per se, but on the other hand, I can't imagine that they are going to need something that can outperform X11 for gpu intensive applications like gaming development. I'd love to be wrong about that last bit though. Whatever they mean by it though, it'll be nice to see.

I really don't think they will replace X11. It's a stable and effective windowing system, and it also consumes low amount of resources (my N800 also runs one perfectly fine, and that's a 400MHz ARM with no GPU). It is also really powerful on appropriate hardware (with wine I can perfectly well play games of the newest generation without speed penalties). X11 is also quite uniform between Linux platforms. It also just provides the bare minimum to communicate with the hardware and display graphic primitives on the screen.
The problem with X11 is that it is a very old design and an extreme pain to develop with directly because of the API 'aesthetics'.. but it would be much much harder to replace it with something from scratch.
My guess is that Google will go on top of X11 and write a window manager (program that manages running windows, adds decorations, bars, icons etc..). Then tightly integrates this with their browser.
Well, let's see what happens.

The problem with X11 is that it is a very old design and an extreme pain to develop with directly because of the API 'aesthetics'.. but it would be much much harder to replace it with something from scratch.

But there are dozens, if not hundreds of libraries which address that particular problem. I don't think anyone talks to X directly any more, it would be a bit like programming in assembly.

And an awful lot of the legacy crud of X seems to be replaced nowadays (although that's still work in progress I suppose). So we'll presumably end up with old compatibility stuff and the new standard interfaces.

Hate to point this out, but didn't somebody else [microsoft.com] already come up with an operating system [wikipedia.org] that was tightly integrated with their web browser [wikipedia.org]? That worked out so well for them!

Well, these are myths about X. First X does not have "Legacy" code. Code is not like milk where it goes sour after a certain amount of time. Code that is decades can still be perfectly good and in fact newer attempts to implement the same things implementing by older code can actually result in buggier code of poorer quality. X is actually pretty efficient and does not use a lot of memory compared to other GUIs. The core X engines probably use somewhere in the area of a few megabytes.

X also has an extension mechanism where the protocol can be extended to keep up with new features and developments. X is a pretty capable system, and keeps up with all of the most recent needs of GUIs. It also has assured backwards compatability and has become sort of an API standard, so you could always count on an X application running on any X server without having to worry about compatability issues. The network transparent design allows for things that are unthinkable on windows, like running programs on one computer and displaying to another, and displaying programs from several user to one X server, etc.

I'd really like to see some innovation there, much like OSX created an amazing GUI layer on top what is essentially Mach/BSD

The OS X GUI layer is essentially NeXTStep on a revised Display Postscript. It's slower and more resource intensive than X11, its graphics is targeted primarily at desktop usage. Where is the innovation?

X11 has been innovative from its inception, and it continues to be amazingly innovative today. For example, the kinds of visual effects Compiz delivers effortlessly and cleanly are much harder to achieve in OS X.

this will be a wake-up call to Gnome/KDE

What exactly do you think will be the "wake-up call"? Both Gnome and KDE have non-X11 backends, but people don't use them because there really is no benefit associated with getting rid of X11.

A non-X11 backend may make sense for Chrome OS because Chrome OS probably needs less functionality than X11 provides and it makes writing drivers easier. But in terms of innovation and functionality, X11 is second to none.

It does have it's own challenges (being somewhat difficult to configure on its own for non-technical users), but the flexibility it affords is awesome.

... and it's a server too! Maybe if we'd spent the last 15 years working on a standard X11-like network protocol instead of hacking stateless application GUIs out of scripted marked-up text, we'd have a more useful Internet than we do now. But I digress.

If Chrome OS is essentially a thin client OS build around a webbrowser... how is it any better than any other operating system?Does it offer anything to make the web experience better than using Firefox on Linux or the Chrome browser on WinXP?

Don't be fooled by the "it's mainly for web browsing spin"? It seemed pretty clear to me. Google's direction all along has been to move applications from the desktop to the web (which in many cases, in my opinion, is a stupid idea).

Google actually states: 'For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.'

Their comments about giving developers the largest user base of any platform are complete bullshit. Web developers already have that user base and not every application should be ported to run in a browser. At first, I cringed a little when I heard that they were getting pulled into an anti-trust investigation. Now I feel better about it. I have always had an uneasy feeling about an advertising company being able to gather and broker as much information about someone as they do. For Christ's sake, they archive, search, and use your EMAIL to develop more targeted ads. The idea that my entire OS could/would gather everything it could on me scares the crap out of me.

I realize I am sort of rambling, but I have two main points:
1) Not every app belongs on the web. In fact, most do not.
2) I am not comfortable with an advertising company being so in control of all of our private data. An earlier commenter pointed out what a big "win" this would be for corporations looking to deploy thin clients. How much of a "win" will it be to have Google searching, indexing, and archiving all of your company's sensitive documentation, all in the name of building better advertisements?

Right, but If we call this new OS, the "Google" OS, then we have to go back and call every other Linux distribution, "GNU" OSs.

Why? I would think that if we call a Linux distribution put together by Google that includes components beside the Linux kernel (whether developed in house by Google or open source components from third parties) selected by Google and marketed by them under the Chrome OS brand as a "Google OS" and as "Chrome OS", then we would call an OS with the Linux kernel and other components selected by, say, Canonical and marketed under the Ubuntu brand as a "Canonical OS" and as "Ubuntu". We wouldn't call it a "GNU OS" or a "Ruby OS" or a "MySQL OS", just because it includes open source components from those sources, just as we aren't calling "Google Chrome OS" names based on where it acquired third-party open-source components.

Sure, if GNU created its own Linux distribution (or, say, released the HURD), calling that a "GNU OS" would be analogous to calling Google Chrome OS a "Google OS", but that's a different story altogether.

You're wrong. It is a Linux distribution. Distributions can differ from eachother as much as they please. That's the fucking beauty of it so don't even begin to undermine it, troll. And don't compare Unix variants to Linux distributions, that only shows how little you know about the subject.

I'm guessing it's more about how you said it than what you said. You are not inaccurate, well the "troll" part is an assumption and could be inaccurate, don't assume malice when ignorance is suitable, but the main points are correct. But phrasing something rudely as you did doesn't server to help anyone any better than a more polite phrasing, and in most cases it actually does a worse job.

All Linux distributions have a Linux kernel, by definition. Most have X. But there's a decent number that skip without KDE and GNOME. There are at least half a dozen competent window managers that are not nearly as feature-rich as KDE or GNOME but great for running on hardware that would choke on the more resource-intensive pair.

I don't mean to denigrate the hard work done by the KDE and GNOME teams. They were decent a decade ago and are excellent today. But one of the territories where Microsof

Nope, its a Linux distribution because it uses the Linux kernel. What you are used to is many GNU/Linux distributions. But there are other distrubtions out there. Gentoo is very different from a lot of other Linux distributions, but it still falls into the GNU category because by default it comes with most of the stand GNU utilities.

Uh? OS X is *very* UNIX like. So unix like that it's certified as such. It's probably closer to what you might refer to as a "normal" UNIX environment than many others in fact. Open Solaris is *much* further away than OS X is -- it even disposes of the normal UNIX permissioning system, along with many other things.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple -- Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

Even with just a browser, you need multiple windows. When an AJAX command tells the browser to pop up a new window, the browser uses the native windowing system to pop up a new window. You also need windows for multiple browser instances, tabs, menus, and other fun stuff. It's not turtles all the way down.

Re Ken Thompson's quote... I'd LOVE to see what KDE and GNOME could give me without X present. It's very strange, I removed them from my machine, and none of my desktop environments would run! What's up with that?

How to spot the people who have never done any graphics programming below the level of a high-level widget toolkit: They complain about X11 yet, somehow, never specify what is wrong with it, or if they do then it's with quotes from The UNIX Haters' Handbook which haven't been relevant for 15 years, or by citing a post by the author of Quartz, which hasn't been relevant for 5-10 years.
A modern X11 implementation gives you:

OS-independent remote display (e.g. show a GUI on a Windows machine or a Mac from your *NIX netbook).

Fast partial-redraws of windows (very important when compositing over a network).

Good OpenGL integration (including network transparency).

A standard mechanism for adding extensions, so new features can be added without breaking backwards compatibility (most of the features of X11 that you use today are implemented as extensions).

The only serious improvement I've seen suggested over the X model is to provide a vector scene-graph API so that you can store the entire sequence of drawing commands in things like OpenGL vertex arrays in the GPU's memory. While this is a nice idea, it would require a radical redesign of all existing GUI toolkits and applications to be used to its full capability.

Oh my god, dude. Do not read the documentation on the modern WDDM... it will break your heart. You're like a child whose puppy died at the vet and no one has broken the news to you... you're still.. just thinking that he lives on a farm somewhere.

I can't believe you think these features are advanced enough to brag about.

Do yourself a favor and boot up Windows on your box and watch a video... enjoy the effortless sound support, and smooth video acceleration. Or activate DWM and move your windows around, watch them not tear... watch the compositing layer not crash. Start up a game and be entranced by what modern graphics hardware is capable of!

Why, you've just listed off a bunch of really basic implementations of hardware acceleration, really life support for X to make it not seem ancient, and yet they're just words. When it all comes down to it, it underperforms in almost any metric of display performance... you can't port games to it, you can't easily accelerate flash on it. It's the reason JavaFX came out on Windows and Mac first, despite the fact that Sun is a major UNIX vendor.

What else is there to say that hasn't been said? It's still constrained through the filesystem socket layer... so you'll always be making more syscalls when performing basic drawing commands. DRI is not broad or extensible enough to take advantage of advanced features on modern graphics hardware, and DRM is fundamentally flawed. It will have to be redesigned if you are ever to get the entirety of OpenGL working.

If you think X is "impressive" because you are able to fire cryptic commands into the CLI and get windows to pop up on different machines, then you need to stay away from discussions on linux for the destkop and restrain yourself. Your corner case is irrelevant on modern hardware, it's difficult to use, and it's people like you who are keeping UNIX from ever having modern display capabilities with your antiquarian usage habits and loud activism thereof. Just keep using X and let regular users have an at least comparable or competitive display system on the linux platform. Let go!

Actually the network transparency is what I really don't like in X. I don't get why it is in there. I would argue most people don't need it. Either because they are running servers without any X or simple desktops. While there certainly are cases where remote desktop access is useful, I really think other solutions like VNC are far superior to X there.

The network transparency costs practically nothing when running local apps (it uses shared memory) and, despite your apparent inability to have ever used X11's network transparency, a lot of us, do, all the time. I use it every single day. Right now I am sitting in front of a machine that has windows from applications running on four different machines, all of which seamlessly integrate into the desktop so that, unless you happen to know which applications are running where, you'd think they were all local apps. I've used VNC. It's not a good solution compared to X11's elegant network transparency. Just because you don't happen to use it doesn't mean there aren't a great many people who do use it regularly.

It doesn't cost anything. Every modern windowing system is a client-server design. Clients send drawing commands to the server and the server controls the display hardware. X11 lets you select the IPC mechanism, you can either use shared memory and local sockets / pipes (like any other display server) or you can use a network socket. A few examples of when I've found network transparency useful: When only one machine in the lab had a CD burner, I could run the CD-R software on that machine while someone else was using it and displaying the GUI on my machine. I also use it when I play music on the machine connected to my amplifier, so I can display the GUI on my laptop. There are lots of cases where network transparency is useful, and this is only going to increase as people have more computers and better network access. VNC has worse performance than X - particularly when you add something like NX in as a cache - and doesn't let you forward a single application easily.

It is just that I think programs with limited set of features are easier to modify. And ability to change is essential for future proof software.

So you're in favour of X11 then? It separates out policy and mechanism, so you can easily replace the window management or compositing strategy without modifying the core protocol. It has a simple extension mechanism, so you can add support for new features easily. Examples of features added via this mechanism include shared memory support, OpenGL, compositing, shaped windows, and so on. X11 lets you add new features easily without breaking backwards compatibility.

its main selling points are speed, simplicity and security -- which kind of implies that the current No.1 OS doesn't deliver in these areas!

Chrome OS focusing on speed, simplicity and security does not imply Windows cannot deliver in these areas. It's just an alternative operating system, and has yet to prove itself. The summary sound rather, well, dumb.

Chrome OS focusing on speed, simplicity and security does not imply Windows cannot deliver in these areas. It's just a still non existent operating system, and has yet to show anything other than a blog post [blogspot.com] about its future. The summary sound rather, well, dumb.

Chrome OS focusing on speed, simplicity and security does not imply Windows cannot deliver in these areas. It's just an alternative operating system, and has yet to prove itself. The summary sound rather, well, dumb.

Oh, don't beat around the bush. I'll come right out and say it. I think Windows 7 is fast, safe, and simple to use. I have Vista, Win7 and Ubuntu 8 on my machine, each with its own drive, and while Vista is a tad bit better than Ubuntu, Win7 runs rings around both, and is easier to use than either. I do not think I have enjoyed using Windows this much since NT first got the Win95 shell.

The web is not the OS. The web is...the web. I do NOT want everything to be a goddamn web app. Web apps work very well for certain applications, and Google has shown that they can push the limits with dynamic content, but that does not mean the web application is an appropriate model for every damned application. I don't like the Chrome browser and I don't need an OS named Chrome that is actually Linux with a lame web browser bolted on as the front end. Google does search very well, but I've hated most of their other stuff. (Google Earth is one exception) I expect no different from this.

The web isn't what it used to be. The days when the web was mostly a collection of static pages are long gone. The web is dynamic, interactive, and user-driven. The web is email, ftp, live video, instant messaging, word processing, photo galleries, forums, flash, games, television... You get the idea.

I do NOT want everything to be a goddamn web app.

I'm not certain that's really something you get a choice in.

Web apps work very well for certain applications, and Google has shown that they can push the limits with dynamic content, but that does not mean the web application is an appropriate model for every damned application.

Technology grows, changes, advances - this is especially true in IT. If you go back a dozen years or so there was no way in hell you'd be able to run a word processor through a web page. Just plain was not going to happen. Now we've got Google Docs, which has some issues, but mostly works.

These days it seems absurd to talk about running Photoshop or AutoCAD through a web browser... But in another dozen years it may make perfect sense.

I don't like the Chrome browser and I don't need an OS named Chrome that is actually Linux with a lame web browser bolted on as the front end.

Would you feel better if it was Apple announcing the Safari OS? Or Mozilla announcing the Firefox OS? Or Microsoft announcing the Internet Explorer OS?

Google does search very well, but I've hated most of their other stuff. (Google Earth is one exception) I expect no different from this.

Other people, obviously, disagree.

I'm not a big fan of Google Earth. It doesn't seem to have much of a point to me. I do enjoy Gmail though, and I make use Google Docs from time to time. Enough people out there are unimpressed with Google's search to keep folks like Yahoo and Ask in business.

The fact of the matter is that an awful lot of work is done through a web UI these days. And if you can replace a full-blown computer with some kind of thin client you can, potentially, save a lot of time and money on maintenance. This is just a web-based thin client, nothing more or less.

And if Google sees success with its Chrome OS you can certainly expect to see competition appear. There's nothing preventing you from rolling out your own Linux+Firefox/Opera/whatever thin client.

The web is not the OS. The web is...the web. I do NOT want everything to be a goddamn web app. Web apps work very well for certain applications, and Google has shown that they can push the limits with dynamic content, but that does not mean the web application is an appropriate model for every damned application. I don't like the Chrome browser and I don't need an OS named Chrome that is actually Linux with a lame web browser bolted on as the front end. Google does search very well, but I've hated most of their other stuff. (Google Earth is one exception) I expect no different from this.

But.. but... I don't know how to program anything else! The web is the future! FUTURE!

In all seriousness, I basically feel exactly the same way. I've been building 'web applications' for companies for years because that's all they're hiring people for. It sometimes surprises me that it ever works at all. The sheer number of brittle components all hobbled together... there are so many weak points where something can go wrong. It just makes for one big headache after another. X11 is a server and has been delivering stateful GUIs across the network since the early nineties at least! It amazes me, the amount of technology we have today, and what we've chosen to do with it. It could have been so much more, but instead the worst possible solution won out the day... and now a whole generation of developers have no exposure to anything else.

Back when telephones were new, no-one quite knew what they were for. One company came up with a music service. This was before radio, so the idea of piping music to your home was radical. This may seem absurd to us now, but it isn't: radio went the other way. It is entirely possible that we could have built a world where we listened to high-fidelity music by phone, and spoke to our friends by radio. Even in the early 20th century the phone companies didn't get it: they ran campaigns trying dissuade housewives from chatting over the phone, believing that the technology was for Important business use (a few brief, high-cost calls instead of lots of cheap long ones).

I remember when people though computers were giant calculators. Then the computer became personal: it could do your books, teach the kids arithmetic, and keep track of your recipes. (Though why anyone you would want to keep their recipes in a computer was never clear). The hardware companies tried to sell to everyone, but they weren't quite sure how to do it: the truth is, most people had no real need for a computer.

Computer technology isn't personal anymore. It's social. The PC is a phone, not a calculator. That's why everyone needs one. That's what driving development of the technology. Ours is not the only possible path: computers could have remained high-cost devices for use by individuals to produce things or do business. But that was the path not taken. This changes what computers are.

To you, desktop applications may seem superior on the basis of their technical merits. Fair enough. Hollywood seems to see computers and the net as a new broadcast medium, like television, for which the current infrastructure has significant technical failings (privacy, QoS). In their case I hope their vision is never realized. But for many people, these visions are irrelevant. No matter the quality or polish of the applications, no matter the convenience of video-on-demand, for them the technology is technically inferior if it does not fully support communication and social activity. For them - and for me - the cobbled together infrastructure of the Web is far superior - technically superior - because for us it is above all a medium for communication.

That reminds me, who is going to sue Google for distributing their OS without choice of browser... United States vs Microsoft

Yeah, because that case wasn't really about a monopolist illegally leveraging their monopoly in one market to gain a monopoly in a second market, right? It was solely because of the US law stating that you have to provide an alternative browser with your OS!

"All Web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite Web technologies," the company said.

Depends on your definition of "automatically". From what I hear, there is this little prerequisite called "internet access".

Also, while it appears that many are finding the news of the new Google Chrome Linux OS a cause to celebrate, I would advise quiet optimism at best.They are yet to release Chrome for anything other than Windows.

A complete Chrome OS may still be somewhere in the (rather) far future.

I wonder if Google will allow native development on Chrome OS? It should be easier to write for than Linux itself is. First off, they have their own windowing system, and that probably means they have done something with sound as well. I wonder if the windowing system is based on a drawing stack that is hardware accelerated? I wonder if you will be able to print?

I really hope they don't force you into writing in Java for it.

And I wonder if they will offer Chrome OS as a VM type of solution that you can buy for Windows?

How is this going to be different from other Linux distros and associated GUI revamp projects that have sprung up promising "we're going to be better than Windows! Really!" over the years?

Because this one will be a distro backed by the marketing clout and the manpower of a 125-billion-dollar corporation. Who have clout with OEMs and governments. Who have enough drones for programming a decent printer driver or providing non-snarky support. Who have a halo shinier than Apple in the eyes of most consumers.

This will be for Linux what MacOS X was for BSD (but with more code contributed back, hopefully).

Computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them.

They are trying to fill a niche of an OS that boots fast and is basically just a browser. This OS will have a desktop with some online favourites... and that might be just what you need on a NETbook..!
Gmail already looks like a standalone app on Windows with Google Chrome and Offline enabled, you get a nice icon on the desktop. And when you click it it loads in a second, instead of the several minutes my Outlook used to take to even be barely useable. The choice is clear, sluggish native apps are becoming obsolete, and lightweight online apps are becoming more and more reliable. And when you only use these kind of netapps, why bother installing a bloated OS. This might just be the next revolution in the netbook industry.

On a side note: I can't wait until a new OS finally achieves the startup times of the good old trusy Commodore 64.:-)

how can a local application compete with powerful servers, it takes my pings 20ms to get to google and back, on old computer (42,000rpm drive) can take a similar amount of time to read its disks (14ms worst-case 7avg), but the processing by google can be nearly instant. Say i want to do 4 things at once that all require small amounts of disk access e.g listen to music,browse the web, im friends, have my email client running, on my computer the disk will spend 7*4=28ms running around touching these files, if i throw this all to google they probably have what i want stored in ram and the whole thing will take 20ms.

Obviously this isn't entirely fair as most OSs will cache files and unless your using fsync too much (stares at firefox) you don't have to wait for the disk read/writes, but this is basically why internet-based apps can compete.

Deep pockets versus deeper pockets. Google's market cap is $125b and Microsoft's is $200b. Not long ago, the gap was larger. Falling PC sales have taken a bite out of Microsoft's revenue. They recently had their first down quarter in their history.

Microsoft still makes 4X the money Google does, though. In 2008, Microsoft earned $17b in net income compared to Google's $4b. Now, $4b is nothing to dismiss, especially when you're using and writing entirely free and open source software, but still, if Google has deep pockets, Microsoft's are even deeper.

Google is probably the only company in the world that can generate excitement about a new OS, and making an open platform will encourage software developers to write apps for it. Hasn't that been one of the big complaints, the lack of software for Linux?

Many have tried taking down Microsoft. All have failed. Perhaps Google is finally the David to slay Microsoft's Goliath. Perhaps not. Exciting times, these are.

This is a Linux distro that can't run any non-google-SDK software. No X server wipes out being able to run most of the GUI software in the ecosystem. You locked to google. Why would I want this? Technical Linux people aren't going to want it. Normal users won't dare install any thing called an operating system. And everyone, will want to be able to run the apps they want, not only google approved ones. All this pain just for browser? This seems to be built on the dream of a thin client that runs nothing but a browser and all software is web software. It's an old dream, the world only needs five real computers, etc etc. Thing is, we don't want to be controlled, never have. I want to run what I want, how I want thank you very much Mr mainframe. If I'm right about the web app stance, this is a stupid idea come up with by people who think they can see the future but aren't looking at the past.
The best google could have done is done yet another standard Linux distro, with X in some form, so they can tap into the existing software ecosystem. They can quality control the software with a repository. That way they can take advantage of much of the existing Unix software. Then they can use their brand, and Linux speed, security, software base, etc etc, to make it big in the OS world.

I think making Yet Another Linux Distro would be a death sentence for it. Who was the first to try that? Corel? Many have, all have failed. It would be relegated to the niche Ubuntu already has.

The one company to really take a unixish kernel and succeed with it? Apple. Many of your arguments could have been made about OS X and the BSD kernel it is based on. I suspect this will be similarly non recognizable to the other OS's using its kernel, and probably have a similar port ability. Taking all the obvious unix-like parts out of it really is required to get your grandmother to use it on her netbook. Think about explaining/usr/lib/etc to grandma. It requires a complete rewrite.

I also think this is going to take the concept of an "app store" to the desktop, which you could certainly argue against, but google is not going to pigeonhole the OS into only web apps. I'd bet body parts this will support Java and some form of native code.

I think it will be an interesting blur between smartphone and laptop functionality, for netbooks. Them saying it is for netbooks is admitting it will not replace a full fledged OS, don't be afraid, other options will always be there. They aren't even aiming at replacing them.

If it's open source and has a unified API, you're overlooking the fact that this is now real competition to Windows. Brand name? Check. R&D budget? Check. Third party support? Check. Linux kernel? Check. Imagine Canonical with billions of dollars.

Hell, if it's actually a brand new WM this will probably take the top distro spot the day after release. Just providing developers with a consistent platform that requires the investment of one working computer and an internet connection is pretty appealing. Even if it sucks for Linux diehards, the competition will change the landscape for Microsoft and perhaps even Apple.

Imagine an advertising campaign: "Is your computer broken? Just stop by your local Starbucks or Staples and pick up your free copy of Google OS. After making room on your hard drive, it will load a new and secure operating system that will allow you to browse the internet, play Solitaire, and write letters with it's included office suite. Once it's loaded, you'll have the option of recovering data and backing it up online for free so you'll never have to worry about data loss again."

Speaking as a web developer, I think it sucks as a platform. HTML is not a very efficient way to generate output, supporting various DOM and Javascript implementations is a real pain and there are so many cases where a web application is not the best tool for the job.

That being said, I certainly do believe it's the best way to deliver information and applications to our customers, but most of our internal business processes and applications would be better to do without.

Will it support Internet Explorer? Seriously this could be a propaganda coup for Microsoft. The layman who does not understand open source or the fact that Microsoft would be free to produce a version for explorer for any open OS . I can imagine some M$ lawyer saying "why do you complain about Windows coming bundled with explorer and not Chrome when you can't even run explorer in the Chrome OS".

For years, we have been hearing about how you don't even need an OS any longer, and how a browser is enough. There is a queue of usual objections to this idea:

Where are my files stored?

How do I edit documents

What if I don't have internet access where I am?

Web mail clients just aren't as good

Well, for the first time, I believe that an internet-only OS is now possible. Most of these objections are dwindling. Peopel backup their files online anyway, so the fear of having someone else in control is going away. How many people have all their bills, passwords, etc. stored on a gmail server somewhere? 3G has made internet access almost ubiquitous, and web apps are getting a lot more sophisticated - enough that webmail is powerful enough for almost the most hard-core email users.

This may actually work now, whereas, even 2 years ago this would have seemed absurd.

Judging by Google's vague statements, it doesn't appear to be meant as a bare metal OS, but something you add on top of what you have. ICBW.

What were you reading that made you jump to that conclusion?

It seems pretty obvious that this will be Chrome on a new windowing system on a linux kernel, developed for use on netbooks. There's no need for a VM, and they don't plan on having people download this - it will be the preinstalled software for low-end netbooks.

This should have dramatically lower memory requirements than Windows XP, and it will run on non-x86 processors. This will allow for the development of much cheaper netbooks!

Just note how they take the kernel, but avoid to contribute to the GUi arena.

Sounds to me like they're contributing a whole new lightweight OSS GUI layer.

I do agree that their model is all about promoting their non-free software (the proprietary stuff they run on their servers). But on the other hand they're doing nothing to prevent people from writing competing web apps.

The Linux kernel and basic related utilities should be set under the Afero GPL v3 license ASAP!

I'm not sure how that would help. We don't hear of many modifications to the kernel or basic utils, being hoarded by the people who write them and run them on their servers.

Lots of comments here are (rightly) skeptical that individuals will download a new OS.

And yet...

My dad has a Windows laptop that's suffering from inexplicable slowdown syndrome -- my meagre Windows skills couldn't fix it (full defrag, adware and virus scan) and the only solution I can think of is a full Windows reinstall.

He might be wary of a live USB drive of an ordinary Linux distro (even though it would be perfect).But something with the warm and fuzzy feeling of Google's blessing, even if all it gives h